


Nightlight

by spacemonster



Series: Steamstuck [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Steampunk, F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-01-09
Packaged: 2018-09-13 19:50:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9139747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacemonster/pseuds/spacemonster
Summary: Steampunk AU, sequel to Lamplit.After a bitter and bloody end to John's first real romance - with Karkat, a hated outcast - the situation has rapidly worsened in the subterranean city of Darkhaven. As the dark closes in from all sides, and Lord English's iron rule becomes ever more violent and sadistic, John and his friends recruit new faces from the shadows to set the cogs turning in a scheme that might save them all.





	1. Your love has got a hold on me.

**Author's Note:**

> **Content warning for chapter 1:** Medical scenes, harm of patient by doctor

Welcome to **NIGHTLIGHT**.

God speed to John Egbert, and might the dark have mercy on us all.

Two Lamplighters brought John crashing to the ground, face pressed into a murky puddle, where he spluttered and writhed furiously, kicking out against them. But they had his hands behind his back, and they handcuffed him; the metal nipped his wrists as he struggled uselessly against them. Just a second ago he had spotted a shadowy figure disappearing into a side alley, and he had given chase out of desperation. Somebody had been following him around, he was so sure – they had to be, because there had to be a way out of this, like that time thousands of years ago, when he had spotted Karkat in an accusatory lantern’s glow, and everything had changed. Now a Lamplighter’s boot was settled square on his back, forcing his face into inches of icy cold slush, that tasted like bitter smoke.

“Out past curfew again, Egbert?” one of them said, and John gurgled in the dirt and wet. “English will hear about this.”

John didn’t care anymore. Let English kill him – what did it matter? Weeks had gone by, John thought as he was dragged to his feet, the front of his jacket soaked with dark, frigid fluid that seeped into his very bones. Weeks, and he had not caught even a glimpse of his old friends. That perfect image of Karkat’s face had begun to fade from his mind’s eye, and whenever he tried to retrieve old memories he felt as though his fumbling fingers were flinging them ever further into the past. Strong and furious hands held him by either elbow and marched him back through the main concourse of the Bazaar. The streets were pitch dark, so the three of them were lit only by the lanterns hanging by their sides. English had placed a moratorium on light. English had made many changes.

Their booted feet tramped through near-silent thoroughfares. Traders had long since packed up for the evening, as the lanterns had been extinguished hours before. The dark was terribly dangerous, but John had been out every night, scouring the city for some face that he recognised, for some scrap of hope, but whenever he went to bed at night, he was alone. No Karkat, no Eridan, nobody. He had nothing to lose any more, so what could English do to him? Strange, dark shapes shifted at the edges of his field of view, a thousand inky black tentacles rippling, braiding themselves into a terrible display, a scant few bold enough to dark into the lanternlight where they immediately volatilised into smoke. These creatures had emerged, lately, with the strict rationing of lamplight. Darkhaven was not so much lamplit any more as it was a brief breath of phosphorescence, drowning in the pitch darkness.

“This is the third time we’ve caught you sneaking around,” one of his captors said to him, as they neared the Bastille. “What are you looking for?”

His love. His moirail. Rose, Kanaya, Dave. Anybody that would look at him tenderly rather than with contempt. Even Vriska would have made him feel better, now, and John ached at the memory of her in Eridan’s kitchen, vulnerable and bloody, gritted teeth, ground down by a regime that was slowly crushing him too. John didn’t have anything to say.

The Bastille threw them into its cold and overwhelming shadow as they passed through its great arch, between the gatehouses that were, for the first time in John’s memory, manned – distrustful eyes stared through slit windows as them as they passed. John hung his head. The braziers burned either side of him, casting stretched and warped shadows, as his captors led him through narrow corridors; their pace quickened as they approached the keep, and John’s breaths grew shallower, his pulse picking up. English was no fan nor friend or his, not any more. The two either side of him released him then gave him a brutal shove, and John staggered towards the locked door of the keep, stumbling and landing with a crack on his knees on the cobbles. One of his captors slammed his fist against the door a few times, sending an echo down an unknown hall, occluded from view. The other grabbed John by the back of his collar and forced him to his feet again; the coarse wool of his jacket scratched his throat and his knees felt weak.

Somebody in medical garb swung the door open – she wore crisp teal blue, pressed felted wool, clean and precise. She motioned for John to follow, and the other two disappeared, leaving him alone with the doctor, who led him towards English’s inner sanctum. She did not speak to him, but she went with him into the room, which was flagstoned and lit by alchemical gaslamps burning bright and low in their sconces. It was tiny, but with an unnecessarily high ceiling, that gave John the impression that he was a rat at the bottom of a well, thrown in to drown. John was not alone in here; there was the doctor, there were a few others like him, and there was English himself, sitting behind his huge desk, reclining with all the furious and precise energy of a predatory cat. John and the other Lamplighters assembled into shoddy rank and file, and English narrowed his piercing eyes, and they neatened up. For a few moments, there was silence save for the hum of the lamps.

“I sense that. We have dissenters. Amongst our ranks,” English said, casting his interrogating gaze along the line of accused. “I thought we had established. That your submission. Is required.”

He paused, and then, “Egbert.”

John did not speak, but he did look up.

“Out after curfew. Again. Stupid boy,” English drawled at him. “You know. What I can do to you.”

He flexed his brass arm, which whirred with a sick metal song and caught the light menacingly. John was perfectly aware of what English could do, because he’d done unspeakable things already. John had barely escaped the worst of all punishments before today – there was one thing that English was prepared to do from which there was no recovery. But even that hideous thing would have been a blessing by now.

English gestured to a chest on the desk in front of him, and the doctor clicked the clasps and let it open. She took out something, some strange item, and all of them watched with fierce curiosity as she approached John, who stood at the end of the line. John did not even flinch as her gloved hands fastened a _collar_ around his neck, but he wasn’t prepared for the sudden sharp sting as a something needle-sharp popped through the skin to sit in the flesh over his throat. He caught his breath.

“The probe measures. Blood serum levels of adrenaline. And oxytocin. Over-stimulation is an offence. Sexual activity is,” English said, and he paused, his lip curling. “Prohibited.”

John stared on, unblinking. The leather lay tight and clammy against his skin and he knew that his body would not betray him. Not today. The doctor moved on.

“Break curfew again. Any of you. And you will suffer.”

John knew suffering too well by now; he had been hollow since he had lost Karkat. That was the last time he had felt anything.

There was nothing more they could do to him.

“Refuse to comply. If you will. But the collar will shock you. So you will adhere to the rules.”

John began to sweat. There was a face in the window behind English, pale and moony in the sooty darkness outside. John recognised the stranger, again, and he twitched. That face had been everywhere, or a figure skulking out of the shadows, watching him, sometimes there would be days between sightings and suddenly he’d see bright eyes across a crowded room and lose his mind all over again. The face disappeared as quickly as he’d noticed it, and English drawled on, unknowing.

“Should you attempt to remove this collar. The probe will administer. A lethal dose of potassium chloride,” English explained, emotionless, care-free. “This will stop your heart immediately. And your pathetic bodies will be paraded. As an example to those. Who think themselves above the law.”

It was funny, the way they all wanted to die, but never would have the energy to try at all.

* * *

John stared, despondent, into the eyes of a crying child, wet and glossy in the amber glow of his lantern. The only light in the district. She held up a sputtering candle in a trembling hand. All around them, the darkness writhed, not concealing its fervour, its slavering hunger. 

“Please, mister. Please. The bad things got my sister already,” she whimpered, tears suddenly spilling down her cheeks. He had made a mistake, to stop alongside her on his patrol route, because he had just given her hope, but he could not deliver on anything anymore. Light had been strictly rationed. Even their lighter fluid levels were under scrutiny, and the punishment for illicit lamplighting was worse than John cared to consider. What would a good man do to save his skin for one more hollow, pointless day? This kind of sub-human behaviour was routine for him by now. Besides, even if he lit her candle, she would likely perish regardless. But nonetheless.

“It’s okay,” John said gruffly, surprising himself with the hoarseness of his voice. “Look at this.” He flicked his lighter into life – English be damned, at least for today – and the wick took the emerald flame easily. The girl beamed at him, the jade light dancing all over her little round face. John’s heart hurt to look at her, so he tried to smile, and then he turned on his heel and trudged on into the shadows. Far in the distance, the honey-warm glow from the Barracks towered upwards like a golden pillar, but here it was dark save for the watery lanternlight shivering at his hip.

She wasn’t wrong about the bad things. They came at night, emboldened by the waning light. Even John could feel them in recent weeks, when he thought himself alone in his bed; they were strong enough to choke his single allowed candle to death. John did not sleep anymore, but lay awake to stare at an endless darkness. He would feel tendrils creep around his neck, heavy… moist. They would slither into bed with him, make his mattress groan with their wet weight. The creatures.

They writhed around on his face, the tentacles, hunting for openings: through the nose, through the mouth, the ears, driving deep into the spaces between layers of fascia, hungry, starving. Horrorterrors wanted brains to eat. That was not a thing he had read in a book, he had seen it in person: charged to evict a family from their home, only to find on arrival that the horrorterrors had already wasted it all. They came from the dark and left people with bloody noses, empty heads. And those who escaped with their lives were left damaged. John would have thought he was losing his mind too, were there anything left to lose.

He could hear something breathing, a wet rattle, a husky rasp. Tentacles undulated at the borders of his lamplight, where the darkness shifted and condensed. It was a sound that plagued him wherever he went, now. Suddenly, something huge and lumbering, it didn’t move like the others, it gave a series of wet slaps and flung itself to the ground before John, its grotesque body hissing in the light, where it turned over and into itself, shifting form, advancing towards him then pulling back, rippling. It dared to lash out with a wet feeler, smearing strange cold fluid over John’s face, its suckers gripping and popping one by one. John’s collar began to spark, which caused the beast to retreat into itself, and it wailed, and John faltered. Then it reared up, an eldritch mass, a black tangle, and it shot out again and wrapped one slippery limb around John’s neck, dragging him closer – he staggered nearer, his collar popping all the while, his muscles twitching with electric energy. He had to fight, it seemed.

John reached into his jacket even as the beast pulled him onto his toes, where he lurched around, dancing dangerously from side to side, his breaths bottoming out. He managed to grasp a test tube – he plucked out the cork with his finger and thumb and then flung it at the beast, spilling a little of the corrosive fluoro-bright liquid onto his own hand in the commotion. It shrieked as the elixir seared a neon hole through its body, reducing its mass to protoplasm that slinked away, defeated, into the darkness. His shock collar dulled down to a gentle static whine. The bright light of the alchemical mixture left dark shapes dancing in John’s field of view, but nonetheless, he tracked the light to where it bled into an alleyway and elucidated a figure, and something reflected at him – John’s collar gave a sudden electric snap – but then their silhouette melted back into darkness.

John could not take much more of this. Months had crawled by. His life wasn’t even a tangible thing anymore, it was a black hole, and the horrorterrors were moving in, braver every day. He never felt anything anymore save for a dim impulse to flick off his lamp and let the beasts eat him alive.

* * *

“You think you’re being followed?”

The doctor, the one who had affixed his collar, looked long and hard at John over the frames of her glasses, fixing him with a stare like he was the fox and she the hound, as he sat there on a medical bench in a dingy, dim-lit room, shivering in a paper-thin examination gown whose edges he’d picked at until they were fraying and ripped. His ribs felt like iron bars closing in on his heart, which thrashed like a wild animal, so hard that he could feel it spasm and he thought it might explode out of his chest. He felt gagged as though he were choking on cotton wool and all he could do was peel off strips of his gown and breathe sharp through his nose and all the while the doctor watched him with hawk eyes; she must’ve thought him insane, he was going to be thrown in the Bastille, he was going to die, and he would never find Karkat or anybody else.

She gave him water to drink and he thought about asking her if she saw him as a dog. He was at least half as pitiful. He was running in circles chasing his own tail the whole time because they’d taken his Karkat away and he just couldn’t handle it any more. He couldn’t bear knowing that the love of his life was out there somewhere suffering, maybe screaming against chains that bound him, or starving, or maybe he was fucking dead already – maybe the next time John saw him it would be as a dried-up corpse… oh, god. His neck started to burn, a cold sweat swept over him, a bear trap closed on his lungs.

Suddenly she took John by the wrist and he bit down on a yelp that threatened to explode out of him. Gently, so gently, terrifyingly, she uncurled his fist and pressed two pills into the flat of his palm.

“This’ll make you feel better,” she said, and he didn’t feel like asking questions. He just swallowed the pills and they scraped down like sandpaper. And then he gulped the water. “There.”

She represented something, some light in the darkness, she was going to help him – probably. English had sent him to her, and John had long since stopped believing that English cared for him at all. He was a pawn, of course, he was a dog, and his brain had started to malfunction, and he needed to be fixed. Or to be put down. These pills worked well; he thought he could feel something leeching into his blood as his pulse staggered and slowed, and his breaths grew shallower, and already he’d given up the hem of his gown and gripped the edge of the bench instead.

“Now why don’t we talk about this stranger?”

“He is following me around. I do not know him,” John said, and then added, “All my old friends are dead.”

John suddenly became aware of some ancient imperative to protect Dave and Rose – dead or alive, he didn’t know, but if they were still out there… his train of thought stopped abruptly. He found it hard to be hopeful anymore. The doctor just nodded, scanned her clipboard. This was his third elective medical. Things were starting to get dire. If his anxiety didn’t improve then they would give him the permanent fix.

“You seem to be a very troubled young man,” she said. “Your notes say you’ve complained of fatigue, hypervigilance, trouble sleeping, anger, depression…”

Some Lamplighters were forced into electroconvulsive therapy to increase compliance. The least trustworthy were now only capable of drooling and lighting lamps. He couldn’t face that. He’d already lost everything; he couldn’t bear to lose himself, too.

“There are so many options for you, John. We can medicate you,” she said. “Something to help with the panic attacks. You will feel much better.”

As John left with his pill bottles in a paper bag, he spotted a stranger across the way, barely visible in the dim yellow gas light. He was hit by the numbing revelation that he’d seen them before, which bore down on him like a crushing weight. John nearly crumbled this time.

* * *

John woke to the static burn of his shock collar, to find that his heart was pounding. Dazed and confused he shot up in bed, threw the covers off. He did not suffer bad dreams anymore – so what was this? He wracked his brain as pain thunderbolted through every inch of his body; his fingers twitched uncontrollably and his arm muscles jumped with the stimulation as adrenaline poured into his blood and the darkness twisted at the edges of his field of vision, rippling tentacles slithering in and out of view. His neck burned like a hot poker was being pressed to it and he let out half a moan of pain as lightning coursed agonisingly down his spine.

And then he realised that it had been a dream after all. A dream about somebody. He was never connected to the real world anymore; he was never even connected to himself. He reached out with a hand whose muscles jumped, and flicked on the fluorescent lamp on his bedside table, which came to life after a sluggish moment. There he sat, hands in his hair, breathing over-heavily, as the shocks slowly grew less frequent, and less intense. It had been a very long time since there had been hands on his bare skin. He had thought he would forget the feeling, but there it was in his dreams.

The collar stopped pulsing, soon, as his breathing grew steady and his heart slowed, and his excitement ebbed. He sat, covers draped around his waist, stale air sitting heavy on his bare, clammy chest, and he watched as the white light flickered and cast shadows. His apartment was mostly empty of furniture these days. His bed and wardrobe were the only items in the room. Any belonging deemed unnecessary had long since been done away with, leaving stretches of dusty carpet and space that was filled only by the lamp flare.

John picked himself up out of bed, grabbed a lighter from his bedside table, and padded across the room. He eased open his bathroom door and secondhand light from the bedroom flooded it, revealing a horrorterror skulking in the bath, endless lengths of writhing black tentacle slipping over and over itself, turning to mist where the light touched it. He had forgotten to plug the bathtub, it seemed. The creature must have slithered up in the night.

It wailed at him. He, naked and unarmed, could do nothing but flick his lighter. It threw out a hot streamer of light, and the beast exploded into an oily black fug that formed a thick patina on the porcelain of the bath and slowly oozed back to the depths from whence it had come, by the plughole. This time, his collar had not so much as beeped. Those things did not scare him anymore.

He opened the medicine cabinet over the sink and withdrew a pillbox. His hands were shaking and a cold sweat had started beading at his hairline.

The drugs were working. The drugs were starting to define his life. He had developed a tolerance. So the doctor had upped his dose and now he did not feel much of anything at all. He wasn’t even afraid of the dark: he’d seen everything there was to fear. He tipped two pills into his palm, and swallowed them with a slurp of water from the tap. Soon the dull fug would take his brain all over again, but it wasn’t as though he ever really felt that alive. It was better this way. It didn’t hurt so much, it was very calm.

He closed the cabinet again to look himself in the eyes. They had once burned bright blue. Someone had once told him they were beautiful. Now they were dull, dimmed, like their fuse had blown. Even his skin was washed out, zombie-dark tan, more ash than gold. And his hair had been cut shorter, too, cropped around his ears. John breathed, hard, huffing the wet, grey air, and tried to feel present, as he moistened a flannel and wiped the blood from his upper lip where it had run out of his nose and crusted. The horrorterrors were hungry lately and his will to fight them was waning.

Maybe he’d just let them have him, tonight.

His neck started tingling as a current hummed in his collar, looping his throat. The only thoughts that ever excited him anymore were the ones where he died. He often thought of ripping his collar off, and he never really understood what it was that was stopping him. He was just another stupid, oppressed pawn. But he did not believe that the collar would inject potassium chloride at all. It would be something for a slower and more painful death. That was just like English.

Back in his bedroom, John eased open his closet and withdrew a clean Lamplighter uniform. Long gone were the days that they wore navy blue and represented something good, something unfailing. Now they were like the darkness itself, and the word Lamplighter was just a formality, just a tradition. John pulled on a black shirt and pants, and buttoned a black double breasted jacket. Its silver embossed nameplate caught the light, gloating over his recent promotion: _JOHN EGBERT, ADVANCED RANK_. Oh, god, he suddenly thought he might panic, it made him feel so fucking sick, he just wanted to rip it all off.

But the sedatives that had leeched into his blood were working very well. A lead weight started to settle behind his eyes. It was easier to submit.

He buckled his belt, holstered two revolvers and fastened a lantern to his hip, before slinging a bandolier across his chest. One half of it was occupied by alchemical bullets in different flavours, the other a series of test tubes containing solutions whose effects ranged from unpleasant to horrific. In the absence of light, only alchemy could carve holes in the horrorterrors. Far from lighting lamps, that had become his job, because by now they were everywhere, teeming in every dark corner.

John laced his boots, snatched his glasses from the bedside table, and left the lamp on. He did not want to come home to an apartment stuffed with creatures crawled from the darkness. Not today.

* * *

A year had dragged by, but John only noticed when he realised that the frosts had returned, coating the city streets in treacherous black ice, and leaving the destitute and desperate to go pale and cold in what few scraps of well-lit shelter were left. Soon it would be Christmas, and John had still not seen anyone from his old life. He traced a well-known path towards the Bastille. He had heard fervent whisperings. He had excavated some last glimmering shard of hope from deep in his weary soul.

John grabbed his lighter from his pocket and flicked it into life; a snake of bright green flame flared up, coruscating a thousand verdant shades before twisting into blues and scarlets. He lit the lantern fixed to his belt and repocketed the lighter. Now a globe of neon light, strong enough to keep the horrors at bay, kept close to his person as he hurried down blackened streets. His light threw much of his path into relief – long shadows sprinted on far ahead of him, and icy puddles underfoot caught a sick glow. The cobbles gleamed wetly with the leftover secretions of chased-away horrorterrors, and a thick mist in the air sat close against his skin, and settled in the back of his throat. As he went, everything became greasy, slushy, and the streets oozed on like entrails that he had to sift through.

Recently, the situation at the Bastille had changed. Those sorry few that were charged to guard the jail were now only competent to respond to external threats; anything resembling a Lamplighter could stroll right by, which John did, trying not to look at their heads or catch their eye, so that he could pretend that their terrible fate did not exist, and did not await him in the end.

He ascended the spiral staircases, which had become difficult with the lanterns mostly in disrepair by now so that the passageways were neglected and slippery; he passed tens of cells that were long-empty, their inhabitants removed and executed publicly, their entire lives reduced to one pointless singularity of dominance and terror. John continually expected a patrolling guard to emerge from a shadow somewhere, but no such a thing happened, and the only sounds were those of his own wet and scared breath and the low hum of his shock collar. He felt something ancient rising in him – excitement. He had a chance again. But when he drew up to Jade’s cell door, he found that he could push it open easily, and when his lanternlight flooded the room, it was empty. No life inside.

For an hour, John sacked the cell. He turned over every object in its meagre collection; the mattress, the bedcover – he pulled the desk away from the wall, he checked the cracks in the flagstones for anything, any small thing that she might have left for him, some tiny message, perhaps scrawled in green ink on the underside of a shelf… but there was nothing. He had finally snatched back a chance from this hopeless regime, but it had been quashed long before he ever returned to this place. Was she dead? Had English killed her? John surely would have heard. He had to go to the archives, seek out the prison records, make some sense of this horrible mess.

So, John turned on his heel, and as he burst out of the cell he looked to either side of him with wild eyes, but the corridors still lay silent and stale, and he was alone. He hurried down the chilly halls towards the basement – they grew clammier and more oppressive as he descended each spiral staircase, his fingers smearing the wet dirt on the stone walls, even as they closed in as the passageways tightened and forbade him. But he had to know, because he didn’t have anything else left. John’s breath fogged in front of his face as he picked his way into the underbelly of the Bastille, and passed through the narrow doorway into the basement archives.

His lantern lit the little space around him, but that was all – no one had touched this place for weeks, it seemed; the shelves set in the walls were all thick with dust, and the reading desks in the centre of the room were empty of their usual stacks of books left behind by some archivist or investigator. Labyrinthine cobwebs hung: expertly placed gossamer that fluttered in the air that moved as John clicked the door shut. John took a few quaking breaths and then began to interrogate the shelves for prisoner records, or anything recent; he ran his fingers across rows of spines, palpating the gilt lettering underneath his shaking fingertips. So many secrets, and even here he would only find scraps to stitch together, and hope he was smart enough to make sense of it all.

Finally, John found the thick tome that housed prison records from recent years. He plucked it from the shelf, ignoring the irksome buzzing and prickle of his shock collar, and cradled its satisfying weight in his arms. Then he slammed it down onto a reading desk and set his lantern beside it. He levered the book open, and its spine seemed to groan under the pressure. Someone had inked in here, recently – the blacks and blues were still vivid and bright even in their grime-packed surrounds. Looking down John could see Jade’s face, rendered forgivingly in pencil lead, peering up at him: her snub nose, her glasses, her copious hair. Her beautiful eyes not done justice in grey. Stamped next to her name: DECEASED.

John lay his hand over the page and took a deep breath. Jade, dead. That wasn’t possible. Surely that was not possible. How could that have slipped past him, how could he have not known that she was up for execution, how could nobody have told him? Horrified, John wondered whether the depressive fog that had taken over his life had blinkered him from his last obligation – to protect the only person whose whereabouts he still knew. Nausea gripped him in an icy fist, his stomach writhed, and he shook. His collar sparked, suddenly, and sent a painful convulsion jumping across his chest. Whimpering, John doubled over the book, breath hissing between his teeth: how could Jade be dead? The whole city should have been in mourning. She was the last light in this cursed place.

Even in his agony John had a sudden idea. He flipped back through the pages. He knew someone else – fifteen years, fifteen years. After a few frenzied moments of fluttering paper, John found him: Strider. And stamped beside his name: DECEASED.

But that wasn’t possible. Because staring up at him, defiant, daring, was a face that he recognised. John’s eyes, wide and wet, fixated on Dirk’s portrait: his angular features, plume of pale hair… if he wore dark glasses like Dave then those had been confiscated for the drawing, and his eyes had been rendered with an intrinsic challenge – a dare. Catch me if you can? But they couldn’t. They clearly couldn’t. Because Dirk was not dead. John had caught a glimpse of him almost every day for months. Dirk Strider had been following him around, and John had been helpless all the while.

Suddenly, footsteps clomping down the spiral staircase outside. John leapt, his collar cracking with a bright and searing pain, sharp claws in his throat. He slammed the book shut and extinguished his lantern, and then, in wild panic, he leapt across the room and hunkered down inside a cupboard, tucking himself up, knees to his chin, and he pulled the door closed. John tried to shallow his breathing, tried to keep calm, but his collar kept up its tinny buzz, occasionally crackling a stubborn pain, causing his mouth to twitch, and John rocked himself a little, in the dark, praying to relax.

“It has been a year. And still no trace of them.”

John recognised English’s voice booming down the hall, and he trembled.

“Yes. I have been informed. That it was a double suicide. But do you not find it suspicious. That their bodies were nowhere. To be found.”

He couldn’t work out who English was talking to. Their voice was very quiet and seemed slow.

“Of course. It was a breakout. You fool.”

They were in the room with him, now. John barely dared to breathe or swallow. His throat felt tight and his heart raced, and the adrenaline that made valiant efforts to prepare him for fight or flight caused only punishment – electricity pinged up and down his spine, hot and itchy and uncomfortable, and John could do nothing but panic like a stuck animal. John heard the flash and pop of a match lighting. By now John could hear the soft, low groans of English’s companion, and his insides felt cold.

“Nobody has escaped this place. In over one hundred years,” English hissed, and John could hear the cold fury rising in his voice. “What have we done.”

A gurgle in response. Suddenly English _howled_ , “WHO IS HERE?”

John had no time to steel himself or move before a Lamplighter threw open the cupboard door and accusatory lanternlight fell on him – he tried to grab the Lamplighter by the wrist and throw him off or hurt him or something, but John’s collar sparked so violently that he could not move – a strong hand in his hair dragged him out and threw him onto the wet stone floor – John tried to snatch himself to his feet but slipped, whacking his chin on the floor, and he bit his tongue, and blood filled his mouth, and all the while English was staring down at him – a booted foot slammed down on his back and pinned him there.

After a moment. “John Egbert.”

Nothing to say. Nowhere to go. Let English kill him. But Dirk was out there, and he likely had Jade, too.

“I am sick. Of your meddling. And your patent stupidity,” English snarled at him, and then reached down, and John felt cold metal fingers against the back of his neck as English gripped him by the collar and forced him ruthlessly to his feet, and then dragged him over to the reading desk, where he slammed John down so that he was on his knees with his cheek to the table surface. John’s collar, interestingly, no longer responded. He had run out of adrenaline. His body, broken, had given in.

“You continually refuse. To behave according to the _rules_ ,” English said, and lifted John’s head, then slammed it hard down onto the table. “You have. No further chances.”

“Are you going to kill me?” John managed to croak, staring at the puddle of his own blood forming before his eyes.

“No. You petulant fool,” English said. “You will undergo. A procedure. To render you. More agreeable.”

John struggled against English’s impossibly strong grip on his head. “I do not want –”

Cut off by English slamming his face into the desk again – more softly this time, so his nose didn’t break, but his face hurt so badly, and his blood tasted so terrible.

“I do not care. What you desire. Or do not desire. I have tried. To keep you in line,” English said, and then gestured to his companion, who stood there, gormless. “The lobotomy barely hurts. And you will not suffer.”

Then his fingers closed over the control box of John’s collar. “I will tear this. From your neck. And kill you now. If you do not consent.”

The doctor had given John some informational leaflets, after she had prescribed him his medication. He had learned about the treatments they had on offer. He had learned about this gentle scraping procedure where the chaotic, unreliable, irresponsible parts of the brain were softly separated from the other inert and neutral parts, to keep the patient calm and docile. He couldn’t bear it. But he didn’t want to die.

“Fine,” John said, and screwed his eyes shut as English pulled him to his feet.

John was dragged through the Bastille; a different doctor shoved something in his mouth and when John spat it out, he was slapped around the face, which left his ear ringing – the second time, he swallowed it, but then thrust his fingers down his throat and threw it up again – English kicked him in his aching stomach which hurt like a white-hot poker, and eventually, the doctors and English grew weary of his behaviour, and someone shoved a needle into the base of his spine, through his shirt, and John slumped, defeated.

They transported John across the city by a quiet route, so nobody would know what really went on in the Lamplighters. Deep in the subterranean bowels of Darkhaven, John was flung into a cell, a quiet and crisp cube of dim, watery light, where he was left to await his procedure. He stirred a little, but did not wake properly. Wherever Karkat was – somewhere out there – surely by now, he had given up hope that John would ever find him again. And he was, perhaps, right.


	2. I will carry you home in my teeth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content warning:** Brain injury, psychiatric medication and its negative effects

Groaning, John rolled over in his cell, pushing his cheek to the floor. He clutched his stomach, which burned with the nausea of whatever drug they’d used to knock him out. Drool slopped out of his mouth and pooled on the grimy, bloody stone underneath his clammy face. He had the sense that he was lucky to be alive, from the pain coursing through him and the slowness in his head, and the difficulty he had forcing his lungs to expand and take air, and the sluggish, tumultuous pace of his heart as it tripped over itself like it had forgotten the careful choreographed motions that kept him alive. His breath came in hitched, jagged rasps, cut with hisses of pain; he curled into the foetal position, limbs twitching painfully, and he tucked his chin to his chest, and whimpered. John knew he had to get up, but it was so impossibly difficult – he swivelled his eyes around the room, taking in what he could with his addled brain.

The cell was empty save for him. He had been stripped of his weapons and his Lamplighter jacket, so he was shivering in a t-shirt and jeans. He still had on his boots – he could run, maybe, if only they would let him out of this damn place, and if only he could get his legs to move like he wanted. His cell had a barred door, and the corridor outside was lanternlit, throwing cold and inhospitable slats of light over him that had him squinting like a suspect under interrogation. The ceiling, he momentarily realised, dripped on him – a continual plip plop of stale water onto his cheek. He stuck out his tongue and licked a little off, but tasted only his own miserable blood and sweat.

After a moment, John tried his best to throw his weight onto his knees; he failed the first time and caught himself with a jarring pain in his wrists as his palms slammed into the flagstones. This set off his collar with a terrible spark that caused the left side of his face to spasm, and he cried out in frustration. Someone then stepped in front of his cell door, blocking the light, but when John looked up he could see their silhouette pointing a gun at him, and he yelped, and threw himself down, and he skidded over into the corner, shocks coursing down his back, his legs refusing to function, but his arms instinctually flew over his head… and after a moment, the shadow moved, and the room filled with slatted light once more.

Slowly, carefully, as not to over-excite his flayed and feeble body, John dragged himself back over to the cell door. And he pressed his face up against the rusting slats, which smeared orange stains over his already grubby skin. It was cool. He squinted in the light which now seemed aggressively, unnecessarily bright, and peered down the corridor as best he could from his limited vantage point – a couple of guards, their feet dragging with an unearthly shuffling sound, putting John in mind of the walking dead. They likely had suffered the same fate that awaited him.

John frowned, and thought about his brain, the seat of his consciousness. It was hard to imagine what it would be like to not be John – there was no doubt he would not be himself any more, not after the procedure. It was a fate too grisly to contemplate. However, and this thought came with some relief, he would likely cease to care about Karkat, and he would probably stop feeling so alone. He would probably stop feeling anything at all. That would be a relief, he thought desperately. For so long he had barely slipped past the iron grip of English’s regime, but it had been pointless all along. If he couldn’t find Karkat or anyone else, then he didn’t have anything anymore. Despondent, he stared at the stone wall opposite, and the lanternlight dancing. Karkat could still be alive, and John was stuck here, and soon he would be of no use to anybody. But he had looked so hard, and for so long, almost every single night, and he’d made no inroads whatsoever, even with Dirk Strider on his tail the whole time. But his number was finally up, and nobody was here to save him, and frankly, he was tired of trying.

A strange slurping noise suddenly caught his attention. In the corner of his cell, something had begun to take form, quietly squelching just outside of the lantern’s glare. John swallowed, his throat dry as a burned-out lamp, and he pushed himself up against the cell door, the bars pressing indentations into his weary back. He could barely make out the edges of the creature’s dark and writhing body. As it slipped and quivered, it practiced extending its tentacles and gripping close to itself, strengthening by the second as it guzzled the darkness. Slimy and wet, it glistened.

“Help,” John tried, but his voice barely worked. “Help!” He made barely more than an insistent rasp, and his collar began, faithfully, to send a feeble current down his spine that rapidly picked up pace and strength, sending his legs splaying pointlessly in either direction. He twisted around to grip the iron bars with herculean effort and shook them forcefully; clangs reverberated along the corridor and the two guards came hobbling towards him even as the horrorterror thickened and quickened, oozing towards him with a ravenous hunger and irrepressible delight.

By the time the guards reached him, the horrible, wet tentacles were bound closely to his neck, tickling him, tasting him. John stared up at them, imploring, desperate, but when they looked back at him their eyes were dead and empty. He pressed his lips firmly shut as cold and wet feelers tried to force themselves inside, but he knew he only had a second before they tried his nose instead. He flicked his hands up to his face, grasped onto the lengths that felt like terrible, fat slugs, and tried to peel them away – but they only held firmer, so that he felt he might have to rip his skin off altogether to be free of them. 

“Help me,” John breathed, “It will kill me.”

It seemed like he couldn’t explain in a way that the guards could understand, and the horrorterror had intercalated itself with his fingers and tightened its noose around his neck, and the frigid black slime slipped under his shirt and felt like ice held against his papery skin, like it had infiltrated his bones. Slack-jawed, the guards stared at him, as though there was no line in their programming that they could deploy to respond to this situation. As a last-ditch, desperate effort, John reached his hand through the bars and stretched out his fingers, trying to grab a stoppered test tube from the guard’s bandolier – but he could not reach, and they did not approach him, only stare, nonplussed, as the tentacle bound his other arm, and made rippling advances towards his nose and his ears.

And then – a distant noise, the creaking of a rusted iron hinge, which made the horrorterror hesitate for just a second. Following that, two whip-cracks and the hiss of bullets speeding, which left the guards tumbling to the ground like wasted, derelict buildings. The corridor flooded with a light more intense than John had ever seen, that seared more vividly than he had ever even imagined; it was a colour John had never seen before. It was such bright tangerine. The horrorterror gave a huge, last-ditch effort to strangle him, and then forced a thick, fat tentacle up his nose; John fell backwards, sprawling, twitching, eyes screwed shut – the force split his nasal cavity open with a crippling pain and the back of his throat filled with blood, but as the light hit it, the beast disappeared into vapour, and so John had only a nasty nosebleed and a bad taste in his mouth, and that was all. He rolled to the side so the blood ran out.

He could not move, only listen to the sound of corpses being dragged and keys jangling. The door to his cell was pushed open, and someone stepped inside, carrying with them that wild light. Behind his shut eyelids, John could see only crimson velvet. The lamp’s glare was so vivid that John could no longer hear even the faintest horrorterror slithering. Shortly, he felt the heat pouring off the lantern against his cheek, offset by the biting pain behind his nose. Whoever this person was, they’d shown up just in time. He cracked his eye open, and the blazing tungsten of the lamp gave him a pleasant surprise. So bright, so light. The lantern wasn’t like anything he had ever seen: the metal was far from the typical brass or iron. It looked too silvery, too shiny, reflecting his own bloody face at him in crystal-sharp clarity, like chromium or similar. The light wasn’t candleflame, either, it was an incandescent bar that poured such radiant light that it left ghostly shapes hovering in front of his eyes. He thought it must have been alchemical, to be that shockingly bright, to chase off the horrorterrors that easily.

“You still alive?” the stranger said, in a voice that sounded familiar – with a certain twang, but weathered and gravelled with time.

“Think so,” John spat out, gooily, in response. Everything was gummed up with blood and swollen. John tried his best to look up at the stranger, his eyes opened to bloody half-moons.

His saviour was presently squatting beside him, resting his elbows on his knees and his chin on the backs of his hands. He seemed perched, like a beautiful bird. The lamplight painted him a very vibrant colour, a light tan, incandescent gold and speckled with freckles. A plume of yellow-blond hair flopped a little messily forwards, and now he observed John over the top of a pair of pointed dark glasses. His eyes were candleflame orange. John caught his breath. This person was caustic and stunning and more colour than John had seen in months. The angles of the man’s face were familiar: John knew that jawline, that barely-there slant of a smirk.

“Dave?” John was stupid enough to ask, and the stranger didn’t so much as flinch, but after a moment he shook his head, and then John spotted the differences. 

Where Dave was skinny and angular, this man was padded out with sinewy muscle, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, if a little wasted-looking and hungry. He wore black mechanic’s overalls, unzipped enough that the sickle-sharp angles of his collarbones were exposed. His face was shallowly lined – he was older, some years older – and his hands were calloused and thickly scarred. One hand, quite suddenly, was pressed against John, rubbing his shoulder. John made a small noise in the back of his clotted throat. Nobody had touched him in a while.

“Not Dave, kid,” the man said, as John breathed hoarse through his mouth at the thumb pressing into his shoulder. “Dirk Strider.”

“This is a dream,” John informed him, still staring at his tiger-bright eyes. It was like meeting a ghost. John knew Dirk from a long time ago – he had been young. “You caught me. Finally.”

“Yeah,” Dirk said, and he sighed. “John, I’m sorry. It was so hard to get you alone. I didn’t think it’d be like this.”

When Dirk said his name, John’s heart flipped, and some ancient part of his brain stirred. Dirk had finally caught up to him. John felt enormous relief, like somebody had just pulled a splinter out from under his fingernail. He had been so sure he was being watched – in hindsight, he realised he should have guessed sooner that it was a Strider. He could have sensed Dave’s presence so easily.

“What do you want from me?” John said, and he lifted his hand as though to press it to his smarting nose but he didn’t have the energy; it flopped uselessly down and he circled Dirk’s wrist loosely with his fingers. Dirk still rubbed his shoulder, carefully. It was not an unpleasant touch.

“Well,” Dirk said, and then took a deep, slow breath, burning John with his neon eyes the whole time. “Listen, John. I need you to help me. Please, come with me.”

John’s collar sent an immediate pulse of burning white static shooting down his spine, and he jumped involuntarily. Dirk snatched his hand away, but otherwise looked disaffected. It had just been a single shock, though, because he’d let himself get momentarily too excited about a halo-eyed man and all the possibilities.

“They put a shock collar on you? Fuck,” Dirk murmured, tilting his lamp so he could peer at the tiny control box on the collar.

“You saved my life,” John said, nervously flopping his hand over his neck, and looking directly into Dirk’s eyes with fierce effort. “You can take me – anywhere.”

John smirked with difficulty and pleasure, and Dirk’s eyes wrinkled. 

“I would like that,” Dirk said, and then gently, agonisingly so, he touched his hand to John’s shoulder again. John felt numb, mostly, these days, but he certainly felt the warmth, and the weight, of Dirk’s weathered palm. “We have a lot of shit to talk about.”

John’s head felt fuzzy. Not twenty minutes ago, he had been desperately waiting to die, and then suddenly there had been light in the dark, a blistering firework shooting hope into the nothingness, or if not hope, then questions, miles and miles of them like streamers pouring through the dark, and John didn’t know what was best but he knew that he couldn’t be alone, not any more.

“Can you stand?” Dirk said, and he didn’t wait for John to answer. Instead, he looped his hands underneath John’s arms and dragged him carefully and gently to his feet. John lurched to either side at first, and leaned heavily against Dirk, who grabbed his lantern and gestured to the door. “Let’s get out of here.”

Together, they lumbered out of the door, Dirk supporting John’s weight without difficulty. Dirk half-dragged him away from the prison complex and into the subterranean tunnel net proper. As they prowled through the bowels of the undercity, Dirk twisted the dial of his lantern to turn it up so brightly that it began to buzz. The lanternlight made John feel warm, new, and safe – safer under the city streets than he’d ever felt on them, safer with Dirk than with anyone else he’d met for months. Perhaps it was idiocy to trust a stranger, but there was no question that he was Dave’s brother – John suddenly remembered following Dave into the dark to his first night in the Lower City. He knew he could trust a Strider.

“Where are we going?” John said.

“To the Lower City. I’ve been hiding out somewhere.”

“Is anyone with you?” John pressed, daring to hope that Dirk might have made it out with Jade, alive.

But Dirk did not answer his question. John’s insides exploded with curiosity and his collar started up its anticipatory drone again, waiting for him to get just a little too keen, and he’d be shocked back into line. Dirk tilted his head so that John caught the flash of his glasses out of the corner of his eye; he could tell that Dirk was studying his collar, but neither of them had anything to say. Instead, they went on, the lantern purring drowning out the sound of his collar’s circuitbox buzzing itself hotter and hotter. It sparked, once, an electric blue snap in the bronze light, and the current crackled across John’s collarbones and along Dirk’s bicep. Dirk frowned, but didn’t let go.

“What does it do, exactly?” he said.

“It shocks me whenever I get excited… or, uh, feel anything at all,” John said, and then he cracked a real smile. “That stopped for a while. But now you are here.”

“John. I’m sorry,” Dirk said, after a long pause. “I’ll help you, okay?”

John’s emotions were running almost unbearably high. He couldn’t make sense of anything: the fervent excitement, the desperate hope, the strange and secret urge he had to throw his arms around Dirk and never let go. He wasn’t Dave, but also, he kind of was, and it was so confusing. Eventually, they found their way into tunnels that John recognised from forever ago, those well-worn paths he’d picked a thousand times to the Living Room, or to Eridan’s house.

“Almost there,” Dirk said, and then he gestured ahead of them, to rusted iron rungs set in the wall. “Are you strong enough to climb? Fuck, we should have found you sooner.”

“I’m fine,” John insisted, and pushed away from Dirk to prove he could support his own weight. His head felt light, and his stomach like lead, but he would cope. He shambled over to the ladder and began to pick his way up, his arms searing with the effort, his face set in a grim, determined scowl. Dirk was right behind him, patiently giving him time.

Finally, they emerged through an uncovered manhole onto the pitch-dark streets of the Lower City. Once he had clambered out, John was stuck on his knees, and had to rest for a second. Dirk waited beside him, lantern blaring, throwing his gaze around anxiously.

“John, we need to move. I’ll carry you,” Dirk said, and John was about to insist again that he was alright, but didn’t have time – Dirk handed him the lantern, then awkwardly pressed his shoulder into John’s stomach and pushed himself up with a little effort. John squawked and flapped a little, pointlessly, as he was now draped across the back of Dirk’s shoulders like a scarf.

“How are you so strong?” John lamented, and Dirk laughed wheezily.

“You’re scrawny, kid,” Dirk said, and John frowned. True enough, he had lost a lot of weight, because the benzos left him without the will to eat. John suddenly realised he had no medication with him, and his collar snapped violently, giving Dirk pause, but he did not waver, and his grip on John didn’t falter. “What’s up?”

He had taken a dose that morning. Maybe he would be fine? He had skipped the pills for a few days before and it had been hell. Dirk started up again; John didn’t know where he was going, even as the lantern lit up all the burned-out buildings. They were strange and unknown to him by now.

“I was on medication,” John said, and struggled to snatch together the words to explain his predicament. “I need it.” 

“Right,” Dirk said. “What were you taking?”

John did not like this vulnerable feeling; being carried around, being dependent on medicines, being a literal burden, being rescued. He could not reply. It was embarrassing.

“John. Let me help you,” Dirk insisted. “You can pay me back when you’re – better, okay?”

Still, John refused.

“Tell me later. I’ll force you to.”

Already, John was incredibly fond of Dirk. He’d never had an older brother, and his relationship with his father had always been… a little tumultuous. For a long time, he’d been without any kind of responsible adult figure in his life, and he’d been left to figure things out for himself. And he’d gotten himself and his friends in a terrible mess.

Dirk stopped suddenly, outside of a nondescript townhouse, which was as fire-damaged as the other buildings in the row. The windows were smashed in and the door hung from its hinges, splintered and bowed. Dirk set him down as gently as he could, and John huffed a little. Then he was taken by the shoulders and steered inside; smashed glass littered the hardwood floor, crunching under their feet, and there was a sour smell of old smoke in the air. They picked their way through the chaos; Dirk lifted a hatch, revealing a warmly-lit basement, and they carefully stepped down, Dirk supporting John by the shoulders the whole time.

The basement was near-silent, humming quietly with the fizzle of lanterns and John’s collar circuitry. It was bare save for a trunk and a collection of strange equipment, and – and –

“John!” Jade shrieked, and leapt up from her distiller to bound across the room, and electricity jumped from John’s collar to race down his arms and legs and leave him incapable of movement, his heart was pounding, and suddenly Dirk was shouldering past him; he grabbed Jade and held her back, and John could do nothing but lean hard against the wet basement wall, panting and shaking, his eyes screwed shut, muscles jumping uncontrollably, head pounding as though about to split open like a rotted apple.

“Is he okay?!”

“He’s alive, but –”

“What is happening? Dirk?” Jade cried, and John squinted over at her; she was trying to force her way past Dirk, but he held her firmly.

“English put a shock collar on him,” Dirk explained, and the calm resolve of his voice relaxed John just a little. He slumped, so that he sat in a crumpled heap, head pressed back against the wall. His collar vibrated and hissed furiously.

“Let me talk to him. Let me _go_ ,” Jade insisted. “Thank you!”

John could tell she would be smiling, now. She never stayed angry for long. He eased his eyes open, and there she was, radiant in the yellow light, crossing the room to hunker down in front of him: Jade Harley. He had completely forgotten how stunningly beautiful she was, because he had completely forgotten that beauty existed at all. Her dark skin caught the amber light and seemed to almost glow crimson, and he found that focusing on the new ways that her hair curled distracted him from the pain. Her eyes, so merry and warm, so fresh and bright, settled on his, and she smiled, a tiny curved thing under the snub of her nose. She was dressed simply, in a black sleeveless smock that hung to mid-calf and touched loosely to every curve and bump. He wanted to throw his arms around her and squeeze her tight, but right now he was a danger to everyone, still sparking at the tips of his fingers.

“Don’t worry, John. It’ll stop in a second,” was all she had to say, and it just stopped, instantly. She soothed him. “See?”

“I missed you so much,” John said, and his face screwed up involuntarily, but he didn’t have the energy left to cry. “I hurt. Jade, I think I’m sick.”

“There, there,” Jade cooed, and put her hand to his hair. “We’ll fix you up.”

She took him by the hand and he got to his feet, and she led him over to the trunk, where he sat, his collar buzzing but not hurting him, his breath shaky and unsure. Dirk sat beside him, and Jade kneeled on the floor again, inspecting her distiller. John peered at it curiously; the curved alembic caught all the light and shone glossily. Some golden liquid dripped from a contorted pipe into a tinny flask. Then Jade looked at Dirk expectantly.

“Where did you find him?”

John was more than content to sit while they talked about him in the third person. He was done thinking, done feeling, at least for now.

“Lamplighters’ underground cells. They were gonna lobotomise him,” Dirk gravelled, looking highly unimpressed. “Got there just in time. One of those tentacle-things was halfway up his nose before I –”

“Gross,” Jade interjected, and Dirk shrugged.

“He’s thin,” Dirk said, and pulled at the back of John’s t-shirt to stretch it against his torso for a second. This was damning: he was all sharp lines and hollowed-out places. “And he needs medication. Not sure what. He didn’t want to say.”

Then, Dirk looked at him. “Anything else we should know?”

John shook his head. “Thank you,” he croaked.

“John, what medicine do you need? I can make it,” Jade said, and she gestured at all of her glimmering equipment.

John looked at his hands and frowned. He didn’t say anything.

“John,” Dirk said, and then he put his arm around John’s shoulders, and John leaned into his warmth. Dirk felt… alive, he prickled with energy. “I had a good friend. She was an alcoholic. You can say anything you want.”

Taking a deep breath in, John tried to relax. He let the air hiss out again, and then he looked over at the corner of the empty room. The lamplight felt restorative, and he decided to believe that Jade and Dirk really could make him better.

“Diazepam,” he eventually said, into the accommodating silence. Then he looked at Jade. She looked sunny, only mildly concerned.

“That explains a lot,” Dirk said bitterly, and Jade tutted at him. “John, we’ll get you off that shit, don’t worry.”

“And we’ll feed you, and we’ll mend your wounds,” Jade said, and a tiny smile played her lips as she returned to arranging her alchemical set-up. “Dirk. Food?”

She reached into her bag and handed Dirk a few notes from a thick wad of cash. John stared as Dirk slipped it into the pocket of his overalls.

“Any requests?” Dirk said, and John just looked at him. “I’ll get something nice, don’t worry.”

Then he ruffled John’s hair, which was more than welcome, and disappeared up the stairs and through the trapdoor.

“John, I’m so glad you’re here with us,” Jade said, and John smiled as well as he could. “You’ve been through so much, haven’t you?”

He nodded.

“You’ll be okay. Me and Dirk only got here a couple of days ago, we’re still working on everything,” Jade said. “With my tools, I can make whiskey and stuff. We’ve made a little money already.”

John could not think of a single thing to say. He was overwhelmed. His collar sparked, and his jaw muscles jumped.

“We broke out. Dirk wanted explosions, drama, all that stuff. I said no,” Jade said, as she screwed together components that John did not recognise and could not understand. Her glasses shone in the lanternlight as she looked askance at John and grinned. “We laid low for a long time. Dirk tried to find you, but it was harder than we thought it’d be. I’m sorry we took so long. John, I missed you.”

“I thought you were dead,” John said, and then his jumbled brain finally spat out a coherent thought. “Did you find – anyone else?”

“We are… still working on that,” Jade said. “We found Jane. Do you remember Jane?”

John was too dumbfounded to speak, and besides, his collar had started up its horrible hum again, and a hot hurt prickled over his collarbones, like needles scraping over the skin. About a thousand years ago, he had saved Jane’s life, and damned them all for it. But she was out there. She was alive. She was _back_.

“I – I –” John tried, but Jade set down her coil of copper wire, and held up her hand to gently shoosh him. She was magic.

“Jane told us everything about how you saved her,” Jade said, her damp eyes widening. “She helped us to find you. She knew where they had put you and she told us, just in time.”

“Where is she? Is she okay? Is she going to come here?” John stuttered out, his heart throbbing.

“She comes to us every once in a while,” Jade said. “The rest of the time, she’s out there, trying to find the others.”

“Karkat?” John was stupid enough to say, and he knew it, once Jade’s expression twitched painfully.

“We don’t… we don’t know where Karkat is,” Jade said. But then she looked at him conspiratorially. “Yet.”

Grinning, now, Jade turned back to her complex set-up of brass stands and pock-marked spherical flasks of thick, yellowy glass. Liquids oozed and solids slowly crystallised, all encouraged simply by a warm candle lit underneath a rusted gauze.

“Listen, John, we’re going to be fine,” Jade said. “You’re going to get better. And we’re gonna turn this place into less of a dump!”

Laughing a little, John looked around again at the room. It clearly had been disused even when the occupants of the house still lived here; it looked like someone had recently knocked down all the cobwebs hanging from the exposed rafters. Unmistakeably, the black ooze and sludge of escaped horrorterrors coated a great span of the walls in a thick, foul glaze. But the blaring of the lanterns dotted around slowly pushed back the mess, revealing old bricks and sturdy concrete underfoot. John thought they could probably turn this place around.

* * *

When Dirk came back that day, he had only been able to buy pumpkin and syrup. So, they ate maple-roasted pumpkin and what few handfuls of rice Jade had been able to filch – and they ate like this for a couple of weeks. Occasionally, Jade or Dirk would return with smoked meat or fish. They had bacon, once, and it was a joyous day. The gaping spaces between John’s ribs slowly began to fill in. Jade, having perfected the synthesis procedure in little time at all, pressed tiny tablets of diazepam for John, and he took a smaller amount every day. The withdrawals were painful and trying; John barely slept, on his little pile of rags on the floor, his limbs shook and jumped of their own accord, and every few days he would have a panic attack so severe that his collar completely incapacitated him in an electrified snap-closure trap, and nobody could get too close to him, or they would get hurt.

But John’s condition did start to improve. And they did change things up in the basement – they scrubbed at the walls and floors with warm soapy cloths until they had bucketfuls of greasy black water and sparkling clean brickwork. Dirk, with inexpert help from John, had manufactured the skeleton-frame of what they planned would later become a bar. They had rigged up a series of makeshift heating elements that glowed cherry red and poured out pleasant warmth, drying up the damp down there. They learned new things from each other; Jade heard how John had hunkered down with Karkat for the last few, fraught moments they had together before everything went to hell, and Dirk relayed tales from when they were all younger, stories about Dave always ending up somewhere impossibly dangerous, even as a baby. One day, Dirk salvaged a few wooden pallets, so their sleeping arrangements much improved as they were raised a little from the colder floor.

Because of his terrible nightmares and persistent insomnia, John was a liability at night, whether he slept or not. So, each night, Dirk and Jade alternated between them the Sisyphean task of keeping John calm and at rest. As soon as John made the smallest inroad into sleep, he would suddenly jolt awake again, cry out, or collapse into himself and curl into an impenetrable, panicked ball. The two of them did their best to soothe John’s real and persistent fears: that Karkat was already dead, that they’d never find anyone else, that the Lamplighters were going to find him and kill him, that he’d never get better. They would put their strong, warm arms over him, shoosh him when he panicked, and when all seemed hopeless Dirk would hold John tight, pushing his face into his chest, and scruff the back of his head firmly. An old trick that, apparently, had always worked on Dave when they were small. 

In their dirty, empty room, the first thing that the three of them had was love. The rest – the riches, the lost and scattered friends, the old flames – they would find it all, in time. By now, John truly believed it.


End file.
